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On April 1, 1979, Elvis Costello and the Attractions performed three concerts in a single evening at three different New York City clubs. The first venue was the Lone Star Cafe, a beloved, L-shaped hole-in-the-wall with a gigantic replica of an iguana on the roof. Sadly, the Lone Star no longer exists. Venue No 2 was the legendary Bottom Line, where Bruce Springsteen achieved lift-off; the club, after many years as a "home away from home" for high-class has-beens, bit the dust in 2004. The third concert was held at a short-lived, long-forgotten Bowery club called Great Gildersleeves, which never achieved anything approaching the fame and mythical razzamatazz of its iconic neighbour CBGBs, located a block or so to the south.
The April Fool's marathon was coloured by drama, as Costello had recently traded angry words with Buffalo Springfield / Crosby, Stills and Nash co-founder Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett, a back-up singer in Stills's touring band. The incident occurred at a Columbus, Ohio, Holiday Inn, when Costello, undeniably under the influence, made a few untoward comments about Ray Charles and James Brown. This seemed then, and seems even more so now, to be a classic confrontation between a cocky young upstart from England and a pair of geriatric Americans. A case can even be made that Elvis Costello and the Attractions were gifts from God, bequeathed to mankind as partial compensation for the horrors wrought on them by His previous creations: Crosby, Stills and Nash, Seals and Croft, Loggins and Messina, and all the other torpid, comfy, easy-listening combos of that general ilk. Costello quickly held a New York press conference to apologise for - and contextualise - his comments (Honestly, your worship, I was only trying to wind them up!) but even so, there was some expectation that unpleasantness might erupt at one or more of the Sunday evening concerts, as irate Ray Charles aficianados gathered up their cudgels, scythes and pikestaffs and took to the streets, seeking blood.
Nothing of the sort came to pass, though the Great Gildersleeves engagement did come to an abrupt ending as a result of a brawl between two bikers and a cabal of slobs from Long Island. Having won tickets to the concert from a local radio station, I witnessed the kerfuffle from just a few feet away; indeed, I had seen trouble brewing the entire evening, as it became more and more obvious that the two groups would eventually come to blows. The official pretext for the brawl was the bikers' earnest and oft-articulated desire that the greaser slobs shut up, stop hassling the female patrons, and let everyone enjoy the concert. It had nothing to do with Ray Charles, Stephen Stills, or, for that matter, Elvis Costello. The unobliging greasers - whose presence at the concert remains a mystery to me to this day - were beaten up badly, even though they outnumbered the bikers 5-2. In the hour or so leading up to the punch-up, I remember looking over at the two Central Casting bikers and deciding that you'd have to be a real idiot to get on the wrong side of them. The Long Island boys were real idiots.
The concert was late getting started, and did not last very long. The band did not take the stage until well past one in the morning, and were probably worn out by all the sturm und drang of recent days. They were touring in support of their third album, Armed Forces, which had been released three months earlier, but the high point of the evening was Pump It Up, which appeared on their previous LP This Year's Model. With songs such as Radio Radio, No Action and This Year's Girl, This Year's Model was immediately recognised, at least by me, as one of the 10 greatest records ever made (even though I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea, inexplicably, was left off the US release by the record company). Though Costello had started his career by masquerading as a punk, in the same way the Police initially pretended to be less than stellar musicians, out of fear of alienating unforgiving crowds that mistook primitivism for authenticity, his songs were far too sophisticated to fit into the punk canon. Punk, like heavy metal, is an art form based on one idea. Costello had millions of ideas.
The night of the Great Gildersleeves concert, Costello chose to end the show by playing a medley including the raucous Pump It Up. He may have done this in response to the punch-up, I do not know, but the song provided a fitting backdrop to the festivities, as it is a pounding and relentless little number, and the bikers were pounding on the uncouth out-of-town youths relentlessly. All in all, the whole thing was a smashing success. Fifteen years later, I met Costello at the rooftop pool of the Bel-Age Hotel in Los Angeles. He proved to be shockingly convivial, easily one of the most interesting people I have ever met. He told me, for instance, that Franz Lizst's last pupil had died within recent memory, a nugget of information I would not expect to have elicited from Axl Rose or Justin Timberlake.
One thing that amazed me about Costello was his seemingly total recall of every concert he had ever given: the night he played Madison Square Garden with the much-admired but doomed Replacements, the night he played The Juliet Letters almost in its entirety twice - as a sort of encore that got out of hand - with the Brodsky Quartet at Town Hall in Manhattan, the night he used a wheel of fortune containing the names of all his songs to devise the set list at a Broadway theatre. And yes, of course, he recalled the concert at Great Gildersleeves. The only thing he could not tell me was whether he cut the show short because of the brawl or because it was already getting on for three in the morning. It didn't matter, it was an unforgettable evening, the kind we all dream about when we first start going to concerts. Various breathless, inaccurate accounts of what transpired at Great Gildersleeves that evening can be found on the internet, but the reality is, the brawl had nothing to do with the Holiday Inn-cident; it was a clear-cut case of white punks on drugs (well, beer) getting in way over their heads, and paying for their feistiness with blood.
Pump It Up is as perfect as a pop song can be, and aspiring songwriters would do well to study it carefully before deciding if they really want to get into the same business as Elvis Costello. After a catchy opening featuring Bruce Thomas's hypnotic bass line and Pete Thomas's assertive drumming, the song is propelled forward by Steve Nieves's cunningly cheesy organ work and that peculiarly declarative way of singing Costello perfected as a young man. The song has a great hook, a great beat and a great break in the middle, and it even has great lyrics. Not that anyone cares, as the refrain Pump it up pretty much does the trick for most listeners. To this very day, at stadiums all over America, sports fans who do not own a single Elvis Costello record go wild when Pump It Up starts ripping through the speakers. They have no idea why. It's as if they were on tenterhooks, ending in dirty looks, listening to the Muzak, thinking about this and that. It's as if they'd been listening to Stephen Stills for the past 50 years, and can now breathe a sigh of relief, as the cavalry has finally come to the rescue.
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